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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (54678)	8/15/2002 11:24:56 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Purely random may not exist. You can say "there is no intelligence there" but I'm not sure most scientists would agree with you any longer. Especially not since we have found that much of the DNA we thought was "extra" is actually sitting around waiting to mutate us. I anthropomorphize it by using the term "waiting" but I'm in a hurry- please don't think I mean anything personal or human by the term.

To: Neocon who wrote (54678)	11/4/2002 1:48:22 AM
From: Jacques Chitte	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82486

Evolution, "properly understood", does not necessarily lead one into such a semantic cul-de-sac. It allows as possible that unguided randomness accounts for all that has evolved, but it does not specify it. Evolution, properly understood, is (imho!)a youngish theory that has evolved(?) to help us make sense of the fossil record, the kinships within the "tree of life", the homologies in the many different and yet similar ways the machinery of life is coded in the DNA. Mutation is understood only in its barest rudiments. (This is more than jmho.) We have some theories of mutation that can be underpinned with experimewnt that works well in relation to what we know of chemistry and of heredity. Making the mechanistic leap from mutation to speciation is something that no careful and responsible scientist (imho!!) will do except at cocktail parties where such flights of speculation are allowed (perhaps even required as a guarantee that there is indeed somebody at home within the warm body. But I digress.) Speciation is still a mystery from the biologist's perspective. Molecular biology cannot be currently stretched far enough to provide an envelope of physics (chemical physics, such as thermodynamics and statistical mechanics) that makes a comfy home for radical changes that happen on a timeframe too slow for the zoologists (and botanists, and even microbiologists, those watchers of the Small and Fast) and too fast for the paleontologists. A scientist may admit to mystery. Imo a responsible one must do so. However, again heavily qualified as mho, but stated with a lifetime of passion: To use mystery as a support for the idea that Creation was necessarily a conscious act is as imcomplete as the opposing article-of-faith that since we have a knack for understanding machines, we are machines. Imo it is possible (in fact, I imagine that there is both wisdom and beauty in entertaining the conceit that) we are more than clockwork and less than the children of an enthralled Almighty.